The present invention relates to a TV phone apparatus which executes communication between remote sites using voice and video.
A conventional telephone apparatus serving as a communication tool between remote sites only functions as a voice transmission means and is not sufficient as an emotion transmission means. Recently, TV phone apparatuses capable of communication using both voice and video are used.
Since a TV phone transmits not only voice but also the appearance of a speaker and background to the partner as a video, all callers can know the privacy of the speaker. Especially, when a person is suddenly called, and he does not want to show his appearance or background, he must select speech communication using only voice without transmitting any video.
As an alternate method, a TV phone apparatus has been proposed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-331509 or 2000-175168, in which a substitute video such as a character image is transmitted instead of a real video whereby the emotion of the speaker is transmitted using the image while protecting his privacy. However, in such a TV phone apparatus, since a substitute video is loaded from a personal computer or the like, the telephone apparatus itself cannot edit and generate a substitute video to be transmitted.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a TV phone apparatus capable of transmitting the emotion of a speaker using an image while protecting his privacy.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a TV phone apparatus capable of editing and generating a substitute video to be transmitted by the telephone apparatus itself.
In order to achieve the above objects, according to the present invention, there is provided a TV phone apparatus comprising image sensing means for photographing a real video of a speaker, first storage means for storing in advance at least one substitute video of the speaker, processing means for extracting substitute video data from the first storage means in place of real video data output from the image sensing means and executing graphics processing, and transmission means for transmitting the substitute video data output from the processing means to a partner of speech communication.